"Google has revealed that it has no plans to develop dedicated apps for Windows 8 or Windows Phone 8 for its business app products such as Gmail or Drive." Product management director for Google Apps, Clay Bavor, told V3 that Google "will go where the users are but they are not on Windows Phone or Windows 8". Ouch - but for now, hard to argue with.

Why in the world would that be a good thing? The more platforms there are, the more room for innovation. Just because you personally don't like the platform doesn't mean it should be abolished. It's not your world we're living in, after all.

Even though I've given up on Windows Phone and I'm sticking with 7 on the desktop, I sincerely hope WP8 and RT flourish. A diverse market is a healthy market.

I'm happy enough for WP8 to flourish, but as a developer of production software on Windows, I sincerely hope Windows 8 and Metro die a quick and painless death. It brings nothing but pain and misery if you're a developer of professional workstation applications running OpenGL. The effort required for our application to become a first class citizen on Windows 8 is probably less than the effort required to port it to MacOS or Linux.

Even the idea of creating a simpler, touch-friendly port for Metro is major pain because of the decision not to support OpenGL on Metro.

Qt decided to work around that with using Angle (OpenGL to Direct3D translation). But it's not an ideal solution. In general MS nastiness and hate for open standards can turn any developer away from their platform, so I'm not really surprised about Google.